In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely as an object of study but as a method of inquiry. To think with the miniature is to reconsider scale itself—not as a neutral or fixed formal property of things, but as a way of seeing and knowing, shaped by desire, enabled by technology, and embedded within power relations. 

From Gaston Bachelard’s meditations on corners and closets to Susan Stewart’s analysis of description and the dollhouse, from Gertrude Stein’s glitter and buttons to Marilyn Ivy’s account of domestic tourism, scholarship on the miniature emphasizes its complex intersections of reverie, memory, and cultural meaning. At once nostalgic and utopic, the miniature longs to embrace an imagined past and to fastidiously calibrate the future.

Technologically, we live in an age of miniaturization. Advances in information science, military surveillance, and medicine require shrinking scale. Miniaturization condenses density and detail, demanding close attention, technical virtuosity, and disproportionately large reserves of capital. At the same time, miniatures abound in daily life, appealing to popular consumer taste and mediating an affective relationship to objects that blends intimacy, control, and wonder. 

The word “miniature” stems from minium, a red pigment once used to mark emphasis in illuminated manuscripts. Even before it connoted smallness, the miniature suggested structure—a way of producing coherence through aesthetic infrastructure, marked by an affective tension between part and whole. Unlike other small scales like the minuscule or microscopic, the miniature’s inward logic engages questions of fetishization, translation, and display, providing a rich lens for comparative critique.

Miniature as Method invites projects exploring miniatures and miniaturization across aesthetic, political, and social realms, especially those working comparatively to rethink diverse times, places, and practices.

Potential projects include but are not limited to: 

• Flash fiction, drabbles, and short prose
• Haikus, tanka, and brief poetic forms
• Aesthetic ideas of scale: minor, marginal
• Short films, music, and small-format art
• Devotional miniatures: altarpieces, reliquaries
• Cabinets of curiosity and portable museums
• Mini consumer goods: samples, souvenirs, replicas
• Fashion and accessories: microskirts, microtrends
• Tiny places and spaces: islands, small homes
• Dollhouses and figurines
• Biological miniatures: gardens, bonsai, toy animals
• Miniature theaters, puppetry, automata
• Architectural scale models
• Mini food videos and slime ASMR
• Mini medical devices: sensors, implants, kits
• Military miniatures: model soldiers, terrains
• Finance micro-practices: microloans, transactions, economics
• Surveillance perspectives: drones, aerial views
• Archives and fragments: time capsules, exhibits, libraries

Additional information & submission portal:https://www.acla.org/seminar/915be957-0285-4f3f-8cb9-75c9e78d6b3c